Omaha-born, New York-based artist Tim Brawner produces a practice of painting that mines the space between the uncanny and the grotesque. Seeking to produce in the viewer a compelling affect of unease, Brawner utilizes the idiom of illustration to render images of alienation, through the purposeful bricolage of disparate representational elements. In each work, a persistently fine, monochromatic, painterly execution meets the artist’s formal drafting process of drawing and montage in order to achieve what Brawner terms a pathos of ‘weirdness’: a form of defamiliarization which is also a seduction, an entreat, into a strange representational space nonetheless evoking trepidation and dread. These visual chimeras undermine the spectators’ traditional binary frames of reference, eliding at once those of conservative Western Christian morality and those of liberal secular paradigms of Enlightened empathy. As the artist intones, this ‘weirding’ is “part of the drama of the work; it is an ontological struggle [of an alternative world beyond our given dichotomies] to be represented… to come into being.”

Tim Brawner (b. 1991, Omaha, Nebraska) received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020. Exhibitions include Zang Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; PAGE (NYC), New York; Yale University Gallery, New Haven, CT; Ashes On Ashes, New York; Yale Painting & Printmaking MFA, Galerie Perrotin; Papa Projects, Minneapolis, MN; Union Pacific, London; Unit London, London; Primary, Miami, FL. Brawner will have his first solo exhibition with Management in 2023.

Tim Brawner, The Escape III, 2023, Acrylic on canvas 36 × 36 in / 91.4 × 91.4 cm

Tim Brawner, Character Head 2, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in / 152.4 × 121.9 cm

Tim Brawner, Character Head 1, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 60 × 48 in / 152.4 × 121.9 cm